{"id":131,"date":"2015-02-19T15:31:40","date_gmt":"2015-02-19T20:31:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/americanicons\/?p=131"},"modified":"2015-02-19T15:31:40","modified_gmt":"2015-02-19T20:31:40","slug":"wonder-womans-costume-woes-by-jenelle-janci","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/americanicons\/2015\/02\/19\/wonder-womans-costume-woes-by-jenelle-janci\/","title":{"rendered":"Wonder Woman’s Costume Woes by Jenelle Janci"},"content":{"rendered":"

Throughout our classroom discussions of Wonder Woman, there\u2019s one thing that continues to bother me: the irony of her skimpy, sexualized costume.<\/p>\n

While Wonder Woman is a model for feminism, I can\u2019t get past the icky feeling of knowing the male gaze was upon her before she even hit the page. Her creator, William Moulton Marston, and her original illustrator, Harry G. Peter, were both male.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe obvious remedy is to create a feminine character with all the strength of a Superman plus all the allure of a good and beautiful woman,\u201d Marston wrote in \u201cWhy 100,000,000 Americans Read Comics.\u201d It\u2019s as if Marston couldn\u2019t think of a way to show Wonder Woman was, well, a woman without baring her thighs and giving her an ample bosom. This quote from Marston also worries me, because it suggests that a woman must be beautiful in order to be good and liked by readers.<\/p>\n

Even in modern depictions of Wonder Woman, her breasts seem to be the most prevalent thing about her. In this collection<\/a> of Wonder Woman art, a few (like the image I\u2019ve embedded from the collection) even feel a bit pornographic to me. While it’s not fair to judge the original based on later depictions of her, these sexualized images show how these artists think of Wonder Woman today. Those meanings are attached to her status as an American Icon.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a clear double standard when it comes to the worth of a superhero and his or her body. Spiderman seems kind of scrawny to me, and Superman gets to enjoy the modesty of his muscles being covered up. The only instance I can recall of male superheroes\u2019 body parts being hyper sexualized, the characters were \u201cambiguously gay<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

An article<\/a> published on pop culture news site \u201cAV Club\u201d suggests Wonder Woman\u2019s costume was inspired by pin-up girls in the 1940s (the time of Wonder Woman\u2019s creation), and that any oddly kinky comic strip scenes of her being tied up and escaping them was a metaphor for women escaping social injustices. That\u2019s all fine and good, by why do I have to see the top of her breasts for that metaphor to work? The answer is: I don\u2019t. I\u2019m more likely to believe a second explanation offered by the same article: by making her sexual and attractive, male readers will feel positively toward a female superhero. Gag.<\/p>\n

While it\u2019s not hard to argue the stupidity of wearing a skimpy costume as temperatures begin to drop in late October, our discussion of Wonder Woman will surely have new meaning when I see women dressed up in less-than-modest costumes depicting her on Halloween. While becoming a recognizable Halloween costume is one of my personal benchmarks of what makes something an American icon, it\u2019s hard to ignore the irony of women dressing in skimpier versions of an already scantily clad female superhero who was meant to represent feminism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Throughout our classroom discussions of Wonder Woman, there\u2019s one thing that continues to bother me: the irony of her skimpy, sexualized costume. While Wonder Woman is a model for feminism, I can\u2019t get past the icky feeling of knowing the male gaze was upon her before she even hit the page. Her creator, William Moulton …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1329,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[54,55,48,53,47,46],"class_list":["post-131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-costumes","tag-feminism","tag-jill-lepore","tag-pornography","tag-william-moulton-marston","tag-wonder-woman"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/americanicons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/americanicons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/americanicons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/americanicons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1329"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/americanicons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=131"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/americanicons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/americanicons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/americanicons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/americanicons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}